Anything to Declare? (3 page)

So on a Monday morning, in summer, Brian and I entered the fray at Gatwick. There happened to be airport strikes all over Europe, so, on the way to our new office, we had to negotiate the large maze of bodies of all the delayed, sleeping passengers, trying to literally not step on anyone’s toes . . . or fingers.

We had, it turned out, arrived at work half-an-hour after the arrival of a flight from America’s West Coast and the passengers were just starting to wander through the channels after picking up their luggage from the ring of hell (i.e. baggage carousel), where it had been very carefully sorted by the airport’s bag smashers (i.e. highly trained luggage handling personnel).

As we were being welcomed and briefed by the duty senior officer, I couldn’t help but notice that Brian was staring hard over the officer’s shoulder. I followed his gaze and there, standing at one of the exam desks, being ‘chatted to’ by one of our boys, was a vision of absolute loveliness: six foot two, long blonde hair, even longer legs, stiletto shoes and silk stockings with a seam running all the way up the back towards a short, figure-hugging silver lamé dress. A few seconds drifted by and the senior officer eventually shut up and turned around to see what had drawn our eyes. We remained at attention for a few seconds . . . until the passenger turned around to pick up her bag and we saw that she had a big, black, hairy walrus moustache; and, now that we looked closer, enormous hands and a large, bobbing Adam’s apple.

Our senior duty officer smiled broadly and turned back to address us: ‘I guess the San Francisco flight is in then. Welcome to Gatwick, boys.’

We soon got into the swing of things. I bagged a couple of small drugs jobs and Brian was spending his time sitting on a stuffer. That isn’t as much fun as it sounds, by the way: ‘swallowers’ were the mules (smugglers) who swallowed their drugs packages and ‘stuffers’ . . . well, you can probably guess where they put theirs. With both swallowers and stuffers, it becomes a waiting game – that is, waiting for nature to take its course and the hidden contraband to come out.

And that’s one thing they didn’t put on the recruitment poster –
‘Join Customs! Watch People Crap!’
You know how they say ‘shit happens’? Well it’s true, it does, and, when it did, we had to sift through it looking for drug-filled condoms by hand.

A week later, we were not only still tiptoeing over abandoned passengers again but we also had to fend off the advances of some religious sect’s followers who had invaded the airport terminal and wanted to give us flowers and bless our aura-something. Brian, who was nearly twenty years older than me and an ex-hippy, said, ‘Blimey! The sixties have reappeared overnight – I feel like I’m having some kind of strange flashback.’ And then he went off to see if anything interesting had come out of his latest stuffer’s . . . aura.

The airport staff and security were both in a flustered state about the religious sect invasion; even our lot – a bunch of usually unflappable Customs officers – were moved to lift an interested eyebrow at the goings-on. We got into our offices and were then dragged back out and into a team meeting that was being held by a very senior officer and some bloke from the Foreign Office. It appeared that within the hour some religious guru was arriving from India with about a hundred of his followers. Add that to the followers already in the airport and we had quite an impromptu religious festival on our hands. The briefing stated that we were to perform our normal duties as far as the arriving followers were concerned but it might be diplomatic to avoid the Big Guru. We didn’t like this at first as it went against our professional nature and natural instinct to pull someone, especially if they expected special treatment; but then we were told that his hold bags on the plane
would
be scanned and searched, that he had no hand luggage and that he would be wearing not a lot more than a yellow sheet. So it would be pretty unlikely for him to get anything through.

Sat at the back of the meeting with his arms crossed like pirate swords was Officer Billy, nicknamed The Beast, so-called because of his undeniably mean and evil nature. We loved him. And throughout the briefing we could hear his constant and hilarious mumbling: ‘Bloody God-botherer and his bloody Bible bashers and this bloody jumped-up Foreign Office toady coming in here trying to tell us our job . . .’ It went on and on but nobody took any notice except us and the senior officer.

The meeting ended and we all wandered out to the channels to see the arrival of ‘the enlightened one’. All, that is, except Billy. The senior officer had decided that it was too much of a risk having Bill anywhere near our incoming Big Guru and so had sent him off on some task in the stores. Soon we could hear the chanting from all the arriving followers and this chant was then taken up by the followers behind us. The first to arrive in the channels were the guru’s flower girls with large baskets of rose petals, spreading them on the ground. We had been told of this ritual – the Holy One’s feet should not touch the floor, apparently. Fair enough. And then he finally appeared: a little chubby chap with a big grey beard and glasses and wearing what looked like cheap flip-flops. Surely, I thought, an impressive flip-flop is an essential part of any religious guru’s outfit? Apparently not. He floated past us with a genial wave and headed for the automatic exit doors. I noticed our senior officer give a visible sigh of relief that the spectacle of Billy the Beast versus Big Guru had been averted.

Then, as the flower girls disappeared, throwing flowers behind them, there was a really loud bang as the storeroom door, which was right next to the exit, suddenly flew open – and there, in full uniform, including hat (black peak pulled down like a knight’s visor), was Billy . . . with the biggest fuck-off broom I had
ever
seen. It was about six feet wide. He looked like a cross between the Terminator and Norah Batty. Cue very sharp intake of breath from one senior officer and several sharp intakes of breath from all attending Customs personnel. In a flash, Billy was out of the storeroom and following the flower girls, who had no idea that he was using his mega-brush to sweep a beautiful clean swathe right through the rose-petal pathway. As Billy disappeared from view, brushing vigorously in front of His now-quite-baffled Holiness, under the chiming of the followers ‘peace bells’ we could hear the low rumble of Billy’s muttering: ‘Frigging holy man my arse well learn what it’s like for us lowly ones down here on earth you short-sighted beardy bastard oh yes you’re in the real world now old son . . .’

The Amsterdam flights were always quite fruitful and the constant work was a good way for a newly qualified officer to put training into practice and, it turns out, to accidentally run into people you hadn’t seen since school.

On this particular day, I had just arrested a Dutchman for smuggling 6 kg of cannabis resin concealed within large soup cans. Which is pretty clever. But we knew that there were numerous places in the Netherlands where you could get this illegal canning professionally done. The one flaw in the plan is that people don’t often travel with large jumbo catering cans of soup – it’s not exactly essential travelling gear and it’s heavy – so their presence alone is a bit of a giveaway.

This passenger had on him six large cans of so-called vegetable soup. I had already opened one and X-rayed the other five so I had no doubt that we had six kilos. The guy was arrested and put into custody, and he asked for the on-call solicitor. Luckily for him, the solicitor arrived within twenty minutes, which broke the average time by about an hour. I couldn’t believe my eyes when an old school colleague, Terry Davis, walked through the door as the on-call solicitor. We played on the same school and county rugby teams but that was as close as we got – we had never been friends. In fact, he hadn’t liked me and the feeling had been mutual.

I greeted him pleasantly enough but his first words to me were: ‘I think you can drop the Terry bit and call me Mr Davis. I am a solicitor, you know.’

Martin, our duty officer, who was well known for his dislike of solicitors, looked up from his paperwork. Now he was interested. I knew I couldn’t lose face here so I replied, ‘In which case, you call me Officer Frost. After all, I am a Crown-commissioned officer.’ Martin smiled and went back to his paperwork.

Things didn’t really get better from then on. Davis got his client to go ‘no comment’, so the interview was very short. To finish off the job, we just needed to open the remaining cans and confirm the contents weren’t exactly the kind of stuff approved by Heinz – even in Amsterdam. I brought all five cans into the interview room so that we could open them in front of the Dutchman. I opened the second can and pulled the cannabis blocks out from the soup. As I was drying the blocks on some kitchen paper, I casually passed the can opener to Davis and asked, ‘Would you mind popping that one open for me, Mr Davis?’ After a moment’s hesitation, he opened the can in a few seconds and then lifted out the cannabis on to some more kitchen paper on the table. As he passed me back the can opener, I handed him a blank witness statement form.

‘What is this for?’ he asked in a snotty tone.

‘It’s for your witness statement for the prosecution, Mr Davis,’ I replied. ‘It has to go on the record exactly who opened which cans . . .’

I left the interview room and he stormed out after me, his face now burning red. ‘You bastard!’ he shouted, his nose only two inches from mine. ‘I can’t represent him now. You fucking set this up! Where’s your duty officer? I want to complain. This means big trouble for you!’

I pointed in the direction of the venomous, solicitor-hating Martin.

Once I had cleaned up all the soup off the drug blocks, I wandered into the main office just in time to hear Martin’s response to the complaint against me.

‘Well then, Terry!’ he said. ‘It sounds like my officer carried out his duty as he should and you, son, are a bit of a twat for opening the can. Now, sir, could you sit over there and write out your statement?’

Davis’s final words to us on his way out were that this was not the last we would hear of it. The duty officer told me not to sweat about it. I was still a touch worried, though, and tried to explain that it hadn’t been a deliberate ploy to get him to open the can, just a genuine request for help.

‘Course it was, son,’ he said with a smile and a wink. ‘Of course it was.’

Benjamin was never the smartest of scholars when we were at school together. He had spent the last two years of school in a cannabis stupor before just managing to get into college to study an ‘ology’. It was there that he got involved in the new and expanding rave culture. His drugs usage moved from the downer cannabis to the hallucinogenic LSD. I hadn’t seen him in a while but what I didn’t expect to see was him being escorted into the green channel by a couple of policemen a few years after our last meeting. Luckily, I was in a position to avoid being involved, yet still be available for advice.

Apparently, Ben had been given the usual security pat down at departures by BAA security. During the pat down, the security officer had felt a body pack on Ben and had got him to lift up his jumper, so revealing a few thousand ecstasy and LSD tablets. He was on his way to Tenerife to make his fortune as a dealer. By the time Ben was delivered to us, he was screaming threats left and right. What surprised me was Ben’s supposed defence that he was shouting out to anyone who would listen: ‘But I’m going
out
of the country, you fuckers! I’m not bringing the stuff
in
!’

The illegality of the exportation of controlled drugs is exactly the same as the importation of them. I don’t know whether years on drugs from a young age had affected his powers of reasoning but he did genuinely believe that because he was taking the consignment out of the country he shouldn’t be in any trouble. As if he was doing everyone a favour by taking the gear out. He was so sure of his legal position that he refused a solicitor and later defended himself in court. And, as the old saying goes, the man who defends himself in court has a fool for a client. Ben got three years.

One person I wasn’t particularly surprised to see again was our Mr Van der Mons, as he came through the airport off another flight from Amsterdam, but I was
very
surprised by his reaction and by what he proceeded to do. While standing in the passport line, he spotted Mick and me. Now, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to get the best and most unusual reception I could ever get from a passenger whose arse I had once looked up – he started smiling broadly at us and waving wildly. Then, at the top of his voice, he started shouting,
‘Bollocks!
Good!
Ha-ha.
Bollocks!
Good!
’

Mick and I looked at each other, a little puzzled. Well, quite a lot puzzled, actually. All the other passengers in the queue shared our bafflement – they looked at each other, then looked at Mr Van der Mons, then looked back at us. It was like a mass breakout of synchronized frowning. I assumed they were wondering how brave, or foolish, you’d have to be to start shouting ‘Bollocks!’ at a Customs officer.

But that wasn’t all our flying Dutchman had in store. As he came through the green channel, he bounded over to where Mick and I were standing, undoing his belt and unzipping his trousers as he approached. Then he spun round and Mick and I – like a couple of astronomers looking at the night sky at a certain time of the month – were bathed in the unmistakable glare of a full moon.

By this time, the rest of the passengers were split between a mixture of hysterics and horror. But all of them might have wondered why Mick and I were just chuckling. What they couldn’t see was that on his bared right cheek there was a brand new tattoo – a British bulldog smoking a large joint and, needled in irreversible ink underneath, were the words ‘BOLLOCKS! GOOD!’ I actually thought, ‘Good lad – fair play to you, son.’ He returned to the queue to a smattering of applause and with a cheery double thumbs-up back to us.

I suppose, if nothing else, it did prove that our Mr Van der Mons must have smoked a shitload more weed than we ever actually caught him with.